THE REACH OF WAR: LONDON; British Report Faults Prewar Intelligence but Clears Blair

A major British report released Wednesday found extensive failures both in intelligence gathering on illicit weapons and the government's use of that intelligence to justify the Iraq war. But it cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair of accusations that he or his government distorted the evidence to build a case for the war.

''We have no reason, found no evidence to question the prime minister's good faith,'' the report's author, Lord Butler, said at a news conference, ''no deliberate attempt on the part of the government to mislead.''

Echoing findings by a United States Senate committee last week, the report also found no evidence that Saddam Hussein had significant, if any, stocks of chemical or biological weapons before the war or that Iraq had cooperated with Al Qaeda.

Unlike the Senate Intelligence Committee report, which passed a withering verdict on the Central Intelligence Agency, the report specifically exonerated one of Britain's top spymasters, John Scarlett, sparing him the same destiny as the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who resigned just before the Senate report was published.

The British findings departed from Senate report in several other crucial areas.

First, Lord Butler, formerly Britain's top civil servant, said Britain had received information from ''several different sources'' to substantiate reports that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from Niger. The Senate report found that similar claims by American intelligence, which found their way into President Bush's State of the Union address last year, were based on a single set of forged documents.

Unlike American intelligence gatherers, Lord Butler said, British intelligence agencies routinely avoided relying on Iraqi exiles as a source for information. The report showed that British intelligence had relied more than the C.I.A. did on high-level agents in prewar Baghdad, even though those agents had no direct access to information on unlawful weapons.

The Butler report was far less scathing about British failures than the Senate report was about American mistakes. But like its American counterpart, it made clear that the British government had relied heavily on ''seriously flawed'' intelligence gathering that was ''open to doubt,'' and had since been proved wrong.

The report was disdainful of the evidence used to support Mr. Blair's claim that Mr. Hussein had the ability to deploy unlawful weapons within 45 minutes. That claim was contained in a British government dossier published in September 2002 that went to the ''outer limits'' of British intelligence available at the time.

A crucial piece of information missing from that claim, the report noted, was that it appeared to refer to Iraq's ability to move battlefield munitions, not ballistic missiles, into position. The report said the claim should not have been made in the dossier and ''led to suspicions that it had been included because of its eye-catching character.''

In a speech to Parliament almost immediately after the report was published, Mr. Blair said he had to accept that ''it seems increasingly clear that at the time of the invasion, Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy.''

That represented a sharp turnaround from Mr. Blair's assertions about Iraq in the months leading up to the invasion. But in an ebullient and energetic performance before Parliament on Wednesday, Mr. Blair seemed to carry off the about-face with some aplomb.

''I accept full personal responsibility for the way the issue was presented and therefore for any errors made,'' he said.

At the same time, though, Mr. Blair and his aides suggested that the specific intelligence about Iraq's supposed illicit weapons was not the prime rationale for war, apparently revising their earlier arguments. Rather, Mr. Hussein's refusal to comply with United Nations resolutions was the prime justification, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said.

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That assertion met with some skepticism from the government's critics. ''He has changed the grounds of the argument,'' said Alan Beith, a legislator from the opposition Liberal Democrats.

Like an earlier inquiry led by Lord Hutton, the report exonerated the government of the charge that it deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Mr. Hussein in an effort to deceive the public and Parliament. ''No single individual is to blame,'' Lord Butler said. ''This was a collective operation.''

That offered Mr. Blair, whose political standing has suffered badly from his alliance with Mr. Bush on Iraq, some relief from the longstanding accusation that he took the country to war under false pretenses.

''No one lied. No one made up the intelligence,'' Mr. Blair said. ''Everyone genuinely tried to do their best in good faith for the country in circumstances of acute difficulty. The issue of good faith should now be at an end.''

The publication of the 160-page report had been seen as a crucial hurdle for Mr. Blair, but both its content and his self-confidence in Parliament seemed to suggest that he felt he had survived the challenge without the kind of damage that could have forced his resignation.

Indeed, the report seemed to reinforce his conviction that the war was justified.

Moreover, Mr. Blair said, if the United States and Britain had backed down on their threat to invade Iraq, Mr. Hussein would have resumed programs to build illicit weapons, emboldening other dictators to follow suit.

But neither the report nor Mr. Blair's defense of his actions could quiet the lingering questions here about whether the Iraq invasion had permanently damaged his standing.

''The issue is the prime minister's credibility,'' said Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative opposition, which supported the war. ''The question he must ask himself is: Does he have any credibility left?''

At the news conference, Lord Butler said the so-called 45-minute claim should not have been included ''in this form'' by the Joint Intelligence Committee, an advisory body headed last year by Mr. Scarlett before his appointment to head the MI6 spy agency.

Moreover, the report said, Mr. Blair's government ignored some of the intelligence agencies' concerns about the flimsiness and limitations of the information concerning Iraq's unconventional weapons when it published its dossier in September 2002.

The report also said postwar checks on human intelligence sources in Iraq had ''thrown doubt on a high proportion of those sources and of their reports and hence on the quality of the intelligence assessments.''

Correction: July 20, 2004, Tuesday Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about British prewar intelligence on Iraq misstated the location cited by President Bush in his State of the Union address when he talked about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium. Basing his comments on a British report, the president said Iraq had made those efforts in Africa. He did not specifically mention Niger, though that country was identified several weeks earlier -- along with Somalia and Congo -- in the National Intelligence Estimate provided to members of Congress on Iraqi purchase attempts. Correction: August 26, 2004, Thursday Because of an editing error, an article on July 15 about an official British report that criticized the country's prewar intelligence on Iraq misstated one finding of a parallel report released the previous week by the United States Senate Intelligence Committee. Like the British report, the Senate report traced several sources that appeared to substantiate claims that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger; the Senate report did not find that the claims were based on a single set of forged documents. This correction was delayed by an editing lapse.